The pundit class has offered a slew of postmortems in the attempt to extract meaning in the aftermath of the 2012 elections. Missing from the majority of these analyses altogether: the real winner of the 2012 election. No, not Democratic Party President-elect Barack Obama nor Republican candidate Mitt Romney, but rather what Portland State University Professor of Urban Studies and Planning called the “Global Electioneering” industry in his 2005 book by that namesake.

“Corporate domination, centralization, and professionalization of political space have eliminated almost all but limited symbolic participation of ordinary people” in the electoral politics, Sussman explained in the first chapter of his book.

Political campaigns are seen as a marketing opportunity for public relations and political consulting firms, a major space via which they can achieve profit margins.

“Political marketing is the offspring of product marketing. Candidates (and voters) have become commodities in the production of the election spectacle…In a highly mediated and entertainment-oriented public culture, political marketers have to work assiduously to capture the attention of likely voters,” Sussman explained.

“The number of political consultants over the past twenty years has grown rapidly,” wrote Sussman in “Global Electioneering.” “There is a symbiotic, mutually constituting and benefitting aspects of the money-driven election system…[T]here are certain groups such as consultants…that always stand to benefit from money-driven elections.”

Importantly, the “electioneering industry” knows no boundaries and has been exported around the world.

The best example of this – but far from the only one – is Bolivia, as featured in the film “Our Brand Is Crisis.” As the film documents, in the run-up to the 2002 election, Democratic Party consultants James Carville, Stanley Greenberg, Jeremy Rosner and others out ofGreenberg Quinlan Rosner took their product to Bolivia and helped the right-wing candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”) defeat the leftist candidate, current President Evo Morales.

Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian explained what happened after “Goni” prevailed in a recent post:

In October 2003, the intensely pro-US president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, sent his security forces to suppress growing popular protests against the government’s energy and globalization policies. Using high-powered rifles and machine guns, his military forces killed 67 men, women and children, and injured 400 more, almost all of whom were poor and from the nation’s indigenous Aymara communities. Dozens of protesters had been killed by government forces in the prior months when troops were sent to suppress them.

Despite the months theatrical performances, when push comes to shove, as Robert McChesney recently concluded in an essay appearing in the Monthly Review, “this isn’t what democracy looks like.”

“The most striking lesson from contemporary U.S. election campaigns is how vast and growing the distance is between the rhetoric and pronouncements of the politicians and pundits and the actual deepening, immense, and largely ignored problems that afflict the people of the United States,” wrote McChesney.